Ga. Says GOP Success, Not Racial Inequality, Explains PSC Elections
A district court stopped Georgia Public Service Commission elections “simply because Republicans have been too successful,” Georgia said Monday at the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court last month vacated the 11th Circuit’s Aug. 12 stay of…
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an Aug. 5 decision by the U.S. District Court in Atlanta to postpone PSC elections over the issue. The court was wrong to say electing Georgia PSC members for specific districts on a statewide, at-large basis unlawfully dilutes Black citizens’ votes in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, said the state in case 22-12593. “The district court accepted a [Section] 2 vote dilution claim because black voters in Georgia (who generally do not vote for Republicans) regularly see their preferred candidates for Public Service Commission defeated (by Republicans),” the state said in a Monday brief. “Plaintiffs never established -- nor could they -- that their preferred candidates’ lack of electoral success was due to unequal opportunity ‘on account of race.’ There was no evidence that the non-black majority voted, on the basis of race, to defeat black-preferred candidates.” The Voting Rights Act doesn’t allow federal courts to force new government models on states, Georgia added: “But demanding Georgia shift from a century-old, constitutionally required, statewide system to single-member districts does exactly that.”